Translation is often described as carrying meaning from one language into another, as though words were freight and the translator merely arranged their passage through customs.

Mireille Gansel offers a more demanding image: transhumance, the seasonal movement of people and animals across landscapes in search of sustenance. To translate is not simply to transfer a text but to travel with it—to enter its climate, history, music and forms of memory, then return altered.

The book follows Gansel’s work translating German and Vietnamese poets, including Nelly Sachs, Peter Huchel and writers encountered while she lived in Hanoi during the Vietnam War. Her own family history—marked by Jewish exile, lost languages and the aftermath of Nazi Europe—gives the question of translation particular moral weight. It is what survives displacement, what power tries to erase, and what permits one person to approach another without pretending that difference has disappeared. 

Her central argument is radical precisely because it is so humane: fidelity does not mean fastening a sentence to its literal equivalent, but listening closely enough to discover what is alive inside it. Translated from the French by Ros Schwartz, with a foreword by Lauren Elkin, this is one of the finest small books about translation, exile and the ethical possibilities of attention. 

First Feminist Press edition and first printing, 2017. Paperback with French flaps; faint handling marks and light shelf wear, internally clean and near fine.